Co-op has a deal for cleaners' helpers

For years, the thriving local Brazilian housecleaning industry has operated the same way.

Savvy immigrants with the best English skills and the strongest social networks build up cleaning routes of 20 customers or more, and make as much as $100,000 annually. They own their customers: And when their routes get too big, they sell off individual customers or entire cleaning routes to other aspiring cleaning entrepreneurs.

Then there are the helpers, mostly more recent immigrants, with limited English and fewer connections. Most make minimum wage scrubbing bathrooms and stove tops alongside the business owners, or instead of them. Many helpers would like their own cleaning routes but lack the money to buy the jobs in the informal cleaning market. And for many recent immigrants, there is almost no other way to get into the market.

Few immigrants ever questioned this system. Until now.

A house cleaner from Rio de Janeiro who settled in Somerville six years ago has launched a co operative that would allow the poorest-paid cleaners an ownership share of the market.

Mônica Chianelli, 38, sees much that she would like to change in the cleaning market her fellow Brazilians seem to have cornered over the last decade: the vast gulf between owners' and helpers' pay; the fact that helpers are sometimes refused pay by unscrupulous owners ; and the custom that cleaners with too much work can charge other aspiring owners hundreds of dollars to turn over their extra jobs.

"In our community, we see these things, and everybody thinks it is normal," said Chianelli, who owned a cleaning route for four years. "I say no. This co-op can fight against this. We just want to give these people another choice."

The co operative, launched late last year, is called Vida Verde and operates out of the Allston headquarters of the Brazilian Women's Group, which connects Brazilian women, teaches them English and other job skills, and, now, helps run the co-op.

So far, the co-op has nine members. Three own businesses. But as Vida Verde grows, organizers hope to help more cleaners build their businesses by matching them with jobs, negotiating arrangements with clients on behalf of women who would otherwise be unable to do so for themselves because they lack English skills and confidence. With their own routes, cleaners will be able to make $70 or $90 per house, instead of the $70 a day helpers earn now.

Most helpers seem to have no way to make the transition on their own.

"We don't see a lot of helpers becoming bosses," said Heloisa Galvão, a co founder of the Brazilian Women's Group. "We want to organize women so they can understand they don't have to be exploited : They have rights."

There are no reliable statistics on the number of Brazilian immigrants working in the US cleaning industry. The 2000 census says 39,000 Massachusetts residents were born in Brazil, but community leaders estimate that there are more than 200,000 Brazilians in the Bay State. Because many Brazilians are here illegally, they do not show up in official tallies.

In the past decade or so, Brazilian women have made the cleaning industry their own, much as Vietnamese immigrants have come to dominate the floor-sanding industry, and large numbers of Ethiopians have taken jobs at local parking garages. Galvão and other women at the co-op said almost all the Brazilian women they know work as housecleaners.

For women with no English skills and little money, it is easy to get work cleaning houses through word-of-mouth in the large, close-knit community. The jobs are appealing because they are flexible and do not require English skills. If the women have entered the country illegally, they can easily avoid detection working in private homes rather than in traditional workplaces. Most have a high school education and some college, Galvão said, but their earnings as cleaners in the United States far surpass what they could earn in white-collar jobs in Brasilia and Sao Paulo.

"These people would not clean houses in Brazil, but here they not only clean houses, they make money," Galvão said.

The industry is informal and entirely unregulated. Women at the co-op told of working for days and never being paid. Several women told Galvão of one boss who ordered helpers to attend her on personal shopping trips to carry heavy purchases.

Women rarely complain, because they can be easily replaced. And many are loath to draw attention to themselves because they are in the country illegally.

In Brazil, Chianelli was a chef who sold home made pasta. When she arrived here, a landlord put her in touch with friends who needed their houses cleaned. In need of more houses to clean, she bought work from another cleaner who was selling off some of her schedule.

"My English is very little, and I didn't have a network, so I bought more work," she said.

She paid $640 for one client, but after just two months on that job, the homeowner told Chianelli she did not need her services anymore. When she called the woman who had sold her the job, the woman apologized but said there were no guarantees.

Sometimes, business owners will sell their cleaning schedules for thousands of dollars and later try to take the jobs back by attempting to persuade clients to return to them.

"The clients don't know anything about this selling," Chianelli said. "This situation is very bad, but it is the usual thing to do. If I have more work than I need, I should give it to my friends. I don't sell it."

Vida Verde, whose name translates to Green Life, is about more than changing the structure of the Brazilian housecleaning niche.

Chianelli also began the co-op to promote safer cleaning products. She and other cleaners said endless hours of working with harsh cleaning products like bleach and bathroom cleaners left them with sore throats, nasal congestion, rashes, and headaches.

"My throat was dry, I coughed, I had symptoms every day," said Erica Rocha, a 26-year-old from Aldeia who arrived in the Bay State four years ago. "I worked 9 nine months with that stuff when I was pregnant."

Chianelli started experimenting with natural cleaners. At the Brazilian Women's Group, she was put in touch with professors from the Department of Community Health and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and they began working to educate cleaners on safer products, teaching them to make homemade cleaners with ingredients such as vinegar and vegetable soap. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health now funds the education program.

The co-op has also attracted cleaners who own their schedules.

Ozilene Andrade, 43, said she was drawn to the co-op because she was interested in the natural cleaning products and the English training. "I never like to use Fantastik. It itches on my skin," she said through a translator. "I can't breathe. And Soft Scrub dries my hands and makes them crack."

Andrade pays her workers more than the going rate, and usually splits money with them 50-50 from one-time cleaning assignments or extra jobs with an existing client, Chianelli said. Andrade, who settled in Medford after leaving Brauna eight years ago, inherited a schedule from her brother, who returned to Brazil. She is benefiting from negotiations Chianelli and the others make with clients on her behalf: They will deal with owners in English, negotiate prices, and explain the greener cleaning products.

Eventually, Vida Verde will be composed entirely of owners. "We are trying to break the system," Chianelli said. "If they can shake it, they can make it. "

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at abraham@globe.com.